.
Along with those questions come some equally important side questions involved with the deployment and utilization of server farms. These include what is load balancing and what is distributed processing. .
What is a server farm?.
A Server farm or cluster is a group of servers, workstations, and storage subsystems that are linked together by a (SAN) storage area network so they act as a single, large computing resource. It's not a new idea it has been done for many years in colleges and scientific research institutions. The idea is only recently making its way into the world of business. .
What are server farms used for?.
Clustering is used to enhance system scalability and availability. It is used to assure that there will be an uninterrupted access to stored data or to applications, regardless of numbers of users or size of memory needed to run an application. It tracks demands for processing power from different machines, prioritizes the tasks, and schedules and reschedules them. 1"Users submit jobs to the load-sharing software, rather than to individual systems, and indicate the priority of the job. The software matches the job to the servers or workstations most capable of handling it and schedules the job for execution. Server farms are able to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, utilizing" processing power that would otherwise sit idle.
What are the benefits of Server farms or clusters?.
2"There are several benefits of server clusters. First they provide a highly available platform for organizing, managing and deploying applications". By allowing servers to back each other up in the case of failure, a 3"server cluster makes certain that applications continue to run in the event of planned downtime due to maintenance, or unplanned downtime due to failures". When a server within the cluster fails, another server (or servers) picks up the workload of the failed server. To the user, the transition is invisible the application that was running on the failed server remains available without interruption.